Dropbox

I discovered Dropbox only last week, as I was looking for a solution to sync my 1Password software between 2 Macs, as mentioned in my 1Password post.

Now I’ve been using cloud storage in 1 way or another for a while now, and do believe it’s the future, as the internet gets faster, there is going to be less of a need for keeping data locally, and everything will be stored and accessed from the Cloud.

Dropbox is a simple piece of software, and essentially give you access to 2Gb of free storage (you can pay a monthly fee for the 50Gb and 100Gb version, however for my needs the 2Gb free version is currently sufficient). The storage is accessible via the Dropbox website, or via a application on your Mac, PC, or Linux machine.

How does it work ? Quite simple….once the software is installed, you get a new folder added to your machine, anything you drop into this folder will be synced with the Dropbox website, so if the worse case happened and you lost your hard drive, no worries !…it’s backed up on the web.

Now the beneficial thing for me was the syncing is done real time, so if you have more than 1 machine needing to access a particular config file to keep in sync, then this is the solution. I’m currently using this to keep my 1Password config file safe, not only is it backed, it’s also realtime synced between both machines, so if I add any new details on my MacBook, these are instantly reflected on my iMac

Dropbox also has a sharing function, meaning that you can share 1 file, or an entire folder with other Dropbox users, so anything you drop into folder, will be instantly downloaded to their machine. This is great if you have work you are collaborating on. It also allows you to send a link to a specific file, if you would like to share this with a non Dropbox user.

Dropbox also comes in the form of an Iphone app (and I believe also a iPad app now). This essentially means that any files I drop into the Dropbox folder, are accessible on the move. I’ve found this beneficial so far with photo sharing, basically, take a photo via the Iphone app, upload to dropbox, and it’s instantly downloaded to all your machines, and anybody your sharing the folder with, or you can upload any existing file from your iPhone to the cloud.

From what I can see, there are no file type or size limitation, so basically you can upload whatever you like.

All in all, a fantastic service, it’s fast, and most of all, it’s all FREE !

If you do want to increase your storage without having to pay, they have the option of the referral scheme, which essentially, if you get somebody to sign up to the free account, you and they both get 250Mb of addition storage, however they say that the limit is 8Gb additional space, so if after reading this, your planning on signing up, drop me an email and I’ll send you a referral link, this way we both get an addition 250Mb free storage.

edit : My referral link is here

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Consolodating email

I like most of you have been using email since it first came out, way back in the days of a 14k modem was FAST !!

As you can imagine, I have switched between many mail programs as they have advanced over the years, and have disks and disk full of archives.

Last week, I came to the conclusion that I needed to get all of these onto Gmail, as I really like the idea of cloud computing, and it really helps when you can get to your email from anywhere.

I’ve tried a number of ways to upload to GMail, eg setting up IMAP and dragging and dropping, Google Email Uploader (which only works if you have a google apps account, and also attempting a few tutorials I’ve found on the web, which seem to be out of date.

I have however managed it, and below is how.

Firstly, you need a “throwaway domain”, I’ve got a couple of domain names that I’ve registered but never done anything with. You will need to have access to change the MX records (normally found at your domain hosting site)

Log into your domain hosting, got the DNS management section and change your MX records to these

Next you need to setup a google apps account, the signup page is here, please note, it was assume you are a business, and suggest the paid version, however just sign up for the standard, as this is free, and will do everything you need.

Right, now that’s in place, you will need to add this account to your main GMail account. Gmail will allow you to download email from 5 external emails. Log into your Gmail, go to Settings, then Accounts. The section that says “Get mail from other accounts:” Add your new account.

The setting for the new account are

Username = full email address
password = your password
pop server = smtp.gmail.com
port = 995
Click the Always use a secure connection……
Click the Label incoming message….I created a Label called “Old Archive”, as google uses Archive
Click the Archive incoming messages (Skip the Inbox)….learn from my mistakes, not clicking this, meant for the last 24 hours, my phone, my mac book, my PC, my Ipod touch have been going mental with new email alerts !!

Assuming you’ve now done the above, your ready with your email.

Ok now to tidy up the email, as I’ve got so many email archives, I had quite a lot of overlap, I found the best way to fix this was to get them all into Thunderbird. If your not familiar with Thunderbird, it’s Mozilla’s email client. The reason I’ve used this, it because, as with Firefox, there are loads of addons.

First thing I did, was (and there is probably a lot easier way of doing this) was to load up outlook, and outlook express, and drop in all the related email archives into each. Once this was done, I opened up Thunderbird, and used the Import function to import all mail from these 2 programs and get them all into Thunderbird. Now all my email was in 1 place, I was time to do some tiding.

I dragged all the email from all the folders (Inbox, Sent, etc) into 1 big folder, I know to some of you, your thinking WTF !!!, but wait, hear me out. As Gmail works differently to other email systems, it stores all it’s email in one please, and separates by label name, and not folders, Also the end result will be all imported with a label of “Old Archive” anyway.

Once you have all the email in one place, I downloaded an addon for Thunderbird to remove duplicate emails (as I type this, there were 2 available, and the Alternative one worked best for me. Once downloaded and installed, right click on your big email folder, and remove duplicate emails. Once done, we’re ready to upload.

Download Google’s Email Uploader program found here and close down Thunderbird.

Enter your throwaway email address (the one set up for google apps), and you password.

On the next screen, select your Thunderbird email mail box, and there should be a count of all your cleaned up emails, select this and hit go. I think mine took about 6/7 hours to upload, so I suggest you do this overnight, or at a time when you’re not planning on using the internet for a while.

What will happen next is this.

The Google Email Uploader will upload all you archived email into your google apps email, your usual GMail account will check for new emails every hour and download these, and apply the label “Old Archive”, job done, all your email is now on googles servers

Just a note, I’m not sure how long this process will take, I set the emails uploading on Friday evening when I went to bed, and I’m still getting email added to the “Old Archive” label, from my understanding, the “get from external email address” has a limit of 200 emails every poll, (meaning 200 emails an hour), however if you did click the Click the “Archive incoming messages” this won’t be a problem, just let them come

1 more note to add, I have noticed that my “Old Archive” label has a vast amount of Unread email, (which would be try, as to my main Gmail account, these will be new emails), if this doesn’t bother you, then feel free to ignore, however if your like me and a little anal when it comes to email folders, I did the following.

Went into settings, changed to maximum page size to 100 conversations, then clicked on the “Old Archive” label, clicked, “Unread”, More Actions >> “Mark As Read”, granted there is probably a lot quicker way of doing this, but I thought, I could do this about a 100 times, in the time it took to google an answer.

I did however find a cool way of finding unread email in the future, as you are unable to create a label for “Unread”, I assumed that google uses this as a function, so in the top search box, if you type label:unread this will display only the unread email, I wish I’d have known this weeks ago, as somebody sent me an email, with the wrong date on, which meant I had to click through pages of emails until I found it.

Well I hope this is on use to somebody, and if I haven’t explained any of the parts enough, drop me a comment or email and I’ll try to help you out.

Cheers

Darren

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